


pushing all the right buttons

by intrikate88



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Manipulation, Self-Acceptance, descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 02:01:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode tag to 1x11, "Releves". Versions of Abigail have died twice so far in her old house, and now it seems time for a third. There's no escaping it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pushing all the right buttons

 

Abigail closes her eyes as Dr. Lecter's finger strokes down her cheek. The gesture is so kind, and so gentle, and such a reminder that she had the worst luck in picking father figures. With her eyes closed she can see, as if picturing from reading it in a book, how Dr. Lecter is going to kill her. 

 

The back of his fingers will drift down her cheek to her chin, and pause, regretfully, before he presses those fingers into her throat. Not her trachea; no, any bruises on her neck will have to appear frenzied, as if they came from a manic Will Graham. Dr. Lecter is nothing but purposeful; he will press both her carotid arteries until blackness overtakes her and she loses consciousness, like the fainting game Abigail used to play with friends in middle school. (Now her best friend is dead. Now the fainting game will kill her too.) He will take her out to the cabin and arrange things however Will would have knocked them about in his insanity, and then he will impale her on the stag horns so that her heart will convulse and stop as her lungs fill with blood. When the FBI finds her body, the time of death will be correspond closely enough with Will's presence at the cabin that there will be no doubt as to his guilt.

 

And her guilt, the story whether she was the innocent child or the femme fatale, will be always a matter of doubt. She pities Will, then, even as she still hates how he echoed what she has been afraid of, that her father using her as a lure really was her fault. 

 

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; maybe she's a victim, and maybe she's a survivor, but everything since her throat was cut and she was bleeding out on this very kitchen floor has been her fault.

 

She has been a survivor, because Dr. Lecter twisted her into one. He made Will Graham into a murderer, because Will was too sick to know the difference. He kept taking people on the edge of death and pushing them until they did something interesting and grotesque and beautifully destructive.

 

And that is when the one spark of fight Abigail has left to her flickers to light, and to certainty. She can't run, not from Dr. Lecter who is a killer or from the law that is convinced she is one, but nothing happening in this moment will ever resolve truth and appearance as being the same thing.

 

Abigail opens her eyes, and Dr. Lecter cups her chin.

 

"You're doing it again," she states, and his hand freezes.

 

"Doing what, my dear?" he asks.

 

"You're…. sympathetic. You're sorry you couldn't protect me, but sympathy from you is just another button you push. You've been grooming me to see things your way; you're not going to kill me now, just like you wouldn't throw away a well-prepared dish just before you put it in the oven. It's wasteful. And yes, you'll kill me now, but only if I show that I'm about to spoil."

 

His hand drops to his side. "That's a very well-chosen simile, Abigail, but I'm afraid that circumstances are, unfortunately, beyond my control and yours. The extent of my influence is for Jack Crawford to believe Will Graham is a murderer, and you do not fit into that narrative. Not as one of the living."

 

"You like narratives, and how people read other people, don't you? How they'll read the same old story of the dead pretty teenage girl, there's nothing new about that. That's not it, though." Abigail steps closer to Dr. Lecter, on the idea that things really couldn't get any worse than being trapped with a serial killer in the kitchen where she nearly died. "You knew I would panic if you told me the FBI knew I helped my dad murder those girls. But I know you didn't tell them about all I've done, because it means you were involved. And Will should be in the hospital, even if they do believe I was involved, they know they can't base any case on a statement he makes right now. I'm pretty sure he was overdosing on Xanax on the flight here, everyone knows he hasn't been well. So the only thing the FBI has on me are guesses and inadmissible evidence." She is still so close to hyperventilating, her chest still constricted from the panic, but she tries to slow her breaths. Breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth, twice. 

 

"Very good, Abigail," Hannibal says, his mouth tightening in his close-lipped smile. "I've found that survival is incompatible with being unable to think through panic. Prey panic and freeze, and so they die."

 

"I'm not going to die," she replies. Carefully, she takes Hannibal's hands, and searches for that feeling she had when she watched Nicholas Boyle's blood spill over her hands and she knew that he couldn't attack her again; it is all too easy to find, and with that instinct she tries not to think too much and lifts Hannibal's hands to place them around her throat. "You've been deciding all along, so decide now. You're free to kill me right now, so am I prey that's already given up? Because I don't believe that I am, and that's the only way I'm strong enough to survive with both you and the FBI ready to squeeze the life out of me."

 

He's not going to do it, she knows, like she knows her father saw something mysterious and powerful in her that she has yet to find, like she knows that everyone's insistence on calling Will Graham's skills a 'gift" is almost as much burden as the skills themselves, like she knows Hannibal's been waiting for the moment when she walked out of the hospital and declared who she is. Not prey. Never prey.

 

His hands tighten around her throat and she refuses to let out a gasp. At least, she thinks, she will maybe not be alive to see what he does to her body when he mutilates her into Will's victim. She looks into Dr. Lecter's pale eyes and will not look away.

 

Grey dots swim in her vision when, after an eternity, he releases her. There will be bruising, she knows, but nothing she can't continue to cover up with a scarf. 

 

Dr. Lecter looks at her with approval, and she is pretty sure what she feels is loathing. "I am not your prey, and I'm not anyone else's. I'm not a stunned deer in the woods, waiting for a bullet." She clasps one of his hands in both her own, pressing blood-tainted flesh together, and the touch is less about familiarity than it is a challenge. "I'm guessing my father always thought he was the hunter, but he saw I couldn't be prey, and it frightened him. Maybe somewhere in his mind he thought he had to hunt all the girls like me who were so that he didn't see me as something to be brought down instead.

 

"Or maybe," she decides, "he was just a sick poisonous bastard who always wanted to kill me and my mom, and he hid it under pretending to be a good dad. Seems like there are a few of those around."

 

Dr. Lecter lifts his eyebrows. "You may find it beneficial to be a bit more opaque in your veiled insults."

 

Abigail mimics his thin smile. "I thought you said we should have honesty between us. Besides, my father was sick. You know exactly what you do. You love being who you are, you don't fear it like he did. You like making Rube Goldberg devices out of people."

 

"Yes," he agrees. "As well as fine dinners. Are we done here, Abigail? Are you ready to leave a life behind in this kitchen again?"

 

"Do I have a choice?" she points out. Both dying and living in that kitchen are a short wake for the end of the last smidgeon of her innocence. The reincarnated shouldn't linger between lives. "Of course I'm ready. There's nothing else to be."

 

She looks around once more; she will not come here again. The girl who lived here and the girl who returned here are dead. Whatever she is now, she isn't completely certain, but she is Abigail, and she is not dinner. She eats hearts and she will be as strong as the ones who force-fed them to her.

 

Abigail allows Dr. Lecter to put an arm around her shoulders and lead her back out into the snow, back to his car. 

 

She barely even feels the cold.


End file.
